Cesare
Page 30
“Joachim, come closer, please.”
The same eagerness shone in the commandant’s eyes. His cheeks were on fire in this damp cave. He was all flushed with a sudden joy. Erik didn’t even bother to strangle him as the commandant crept close. He whispered, his lips grazing the commandant’s ear.
“Joachim, I love her more than I ever did.”
The commandant dug his knuckles into his eyes, like a man blinding himself. But he wasn’t blind.
“Ingrate, we could have spent a lifetime with her ashes. I exiled myself to this little land of lice to be with Lisa. She couldn’t be happy without her Jews—now they’ll be your own silent chorus when I chop off your head. But the executioner will never go near you if we don’t get rid of your lice.”
The guillotine didn’t arrive from one day to the next. Erik wanted to scribble a note to the admiral, but the commandant would have had it delivered to the SS in Berlin. And the Death’s-Heads at Himmler’s palace on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse would block out half his sentences with their grease pencils. Erik’s note would sound like gibberish. Better nothing, nothing at all.
The lice were all over him. A barber arrived from the delousing station and shaved Erik’s armpits, scalp, and groin, but no one bothered with his uniform. And yet when he was paraded across the camp at the end of a rope, like some mangy camel, the children never mocked him. They picked the lice off Erik with their own hands, gave him whatever crusts they had.
And then one morning, the guillotine did come through the gate. A guillotine had never been used at Theresienstadt; there was a great furor among the guards. Erik recognized that little caravan on his morning march. It was the same traveling guillotine he remembered from before the war, when he’d followed the caravan from Kiel to Berlin. And the executioners were the same—Hansel and Gretel, former kindergarten teachers who had joined the SS. But they weren’t as blond as they had once been. They wore goggles now and little caps, and their uniforms were almost as worn as Erik’s. They had also recognized him, and their blue eyes moistened with grief the moment they guessed why they had come to Theresienstadt. How weary they must have been, how disconsolate, rushing from execution to execution in a time of war. They must have wished for their kindergarten again while they were with the caravan. The executions had multiplied year after year; they were lopping off the heads of lawyers who had written anonymous notes, charwomen who had hoarded bags of coal, assorted lunatics, and children who had scribbled the Führer’s mustache on a wall.
These executioners weren’t permitted to chat with Erik, or even share a cigarette with him. They had lunch in the SS canteen while Erik was stripped naked and given a fresh uniform to wear; even the ribbons of his Ritterkreuz had been laundered. Then he was marched out to the long yard in front of the Kavalir Barracks, where the guillotine had been installed. The commandant was waiting with an SS chaplain, who wouldn’t even look at Erik. With them were Hansel and Gretel. Joachim read out some rigmarole about Erik’s crimes against the Reich, and Erik had to sign the paper. Some of the mad millionaires from the Kavalir Barracks stood near the door with their keepers. They wrung their hands and cried.
The commandant shouted at them, and they all ran back into the building. But there were children on the roofs of other barracks, children on the ramparts, holding white banners and flags they must have made out of material from the secondhand shop on Neue Gasse. They were mourning Erik while he was still alive, and the flags must have been like funeral shrouds.
Joachim started to dance about in his boots. “Magician, look, you have your audience of Jews. Would you like to say a few words? It’s the last audience you’ll ever have.”
Erik walked toward the guillotine with Hansel and Gretel, who whispered in his ear.
“We were so proud of your exploits, Kapitän Erik. And we were the ones who brought you to Berlin. But don’t worry. We oiled the machine. It slides like butter. You won’t feel a thing.”
They didn’t tie his hands or give him a hood to wear. Erik gazed at the children on the ramparts, who were as fierce as an SS commandant. The children held him with their eyes, as if they could lift him out of the guillotine’s cradle, right into Paradise. He could feel the glint of the blade in the sun, hear it rattle, and suddenly he was back in Berlin. He saw nothing but rubble and Nazi flags on the Linden. He crossed the Palace Bridge with its stone angels and gods, and marched into Mitte. The Kanal was gray and grim; he saw the jagged edge of an angel’s wing bobbing in the Spree, as if one of the statues had crumbled off the bridge and into the brackish water.
He walked on the bitter, brutal plains of Alexanderplatz; the streetcar tracks were all awry, like twisted rails from some lost carnival. The only traffic he could find were stray dogs and women wheeling baby carriages piled with belongings—chairs, vanity tables, fur coats—until the carriages grew into tottering towers, under all the little rutted stones of the Alex.
Everything seemed desolate and strange in Alt-Berlin. He ventured into Scheunenviertel but lost his way. Erik couldn’t even find the Dragonerstrasse, or the old fire-torn synagogues, or that street off the Alex where the Jewish prostitutes had plied their trade. He saw rubble, abandoned buildings, but not one child.
Scheisse, he thought to himself. Scheunenviertel still belongs to the Jews.
The bakeries were gone, the clothing shops, the stalls, the poets’ societies and fiddlers’ unions, all that bittersweet commotion and melody of strife. And in their place was a kind of morgue. But he did catch a faint tootling from a cellar somewhere.
My God, he muttered. Jewish Jazz.
He found that cellar near the Rosenthaler Strasse—it was a nightclub without a name, in Alt-Berlin. There was no one to guard the door. He went down the stairs and plunged into the dark. And his heart beat with a crazy delight. He’d come home. All the whores from Alexanderplatz were inside, with their summer blouses and silver earrings. There were a few clarinetists and a fiddler. The whores didn’t need clients. They danced among themselves.
“Have you seen my Lisa?” he asked like a little boy.
They kissed him and pointed to a woman in the corner with cropped hair and scars on her legs. She wasn’t even startled to see him. He must have conjured her out of a magician’s dying dream—conjured her and a nameless nightclub in Alt-Berlin. She was wrapped in a white shroud of summer silk and wasn’t wearing any shoes. He had his own barefoot baroness in Berlin.
“Darling,” she said, “why have you kept me waiting?”
“I had to cross a crumbling bridge. The streets made no sense. It was like following an underground river that went nowhere.”
“Nowhere but to me.”
He took her in his arms, danced to the subtle screams of Jewish Jazz, her body caught in the clarinetists’ cry, and it didn’t matter to Erik what material she was made of—ashes or solid bone. Hansel and Gretel would have to wait. He was never going to leave this club.
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